Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
multi-bladed cutting tool. The earliest stone pestles for grinding food also
date to this time, and these pestles are often associated with worn pieces of
ocher that probably served as sources of pigment.
Arrowheads a quarter of a million years old have been found in West
Africa, predating the fi rst undoubted modern human skeletal remains.
Barbed fi sh hooks were invented roughly 100,000 years ago. A piece of ocher
inscribed with repeated patterns of squares and diamonds was found recently
in Blombos Cave in South Africa, and has been dated to 75,000 years ago. Did
this incised object represent an early attempt at decorative art, was it used to
mark the passage of time, or did it have some entirely dif erent purpose?
European culture before modern humans
McBrearty and Brooks concentrated on the previously neglected story of sub-
Saharan Africa. But there are hints that Africa was not the only place where
important cultural advances were being made. Some of those advances even
took place long before the emergence of
H. sapiens
.
One of the hominan species that have recently been shown to possess
advanced culture was the shadowy group of people who preceded the Nean-
derthals in Europe.
The history of hominans in Europe is long and complicated. The old-
est European human bone fossil, from a cave near Atapuerca in northern
Spain, is a fragment of lower jaw associated with stone tools. The fragment
has been dated to a remarkable 1.1 to 1.2 million years ago.
6
Thus, more than a million years ago the fi rst hominans arrived in the
great European peninsula from Africa and the Middle East. They spread
rapidly across southern Europe, from Greece to Spain. Much of the rest of
Europe was eventually colonized by a diverse collection of these peoples.
It is clear that these early Europeans were not our direct ancestors. Because
they tended to have some Neanderthal-like features, they may have been the
ancestors of the Neanderthals of Europe and the Middle East. The Neanderthals
themselves lived much closer to our own time. The earliest skeletal remains
in Europe that can be unequivocally classifi ed as Neanderthal date to about
